Editorial

Last year, Psychoanalytic Psychology celebrated its 30th year of publication with several reflective articles by Bob Holt, Sid Blatt, and Judith Herman. As a completion of this year-long series, we are publishing in this issue a wonderful reflection by Beatrice Beebe that traces her intellectual development and her relationships with two important mentor/colleagues, Joseph Jaffe and Dan Stern, both of whom have passed away recently. Beatrice Beebe's career has been devoted to the study of early life development and applying this knowledge to psychoanalytic practice. Anyone who has a commitment to psychoanalysis values the importance and enduring influence of early life experience, but very few psychoanalysts have dedicated their lives to rigorous research and critical thinking on this topic. We are grateful to Beatrice Beebe and are especially pleased that she has spawned a generation of students who are following in her footsteps.

In this issue, we are also publishing a research section on “reflective function” (RF), the operationalization of the concept of mentalization, that Fonagy's work has spearheaded. Mentalization, the capacity to understand and utilize our own and others' mental states, has emerged from attachment and psychoanalytic theory, and can be regarded both as an aim and a marker of psychotherapeutic change. The first article by Falkenström et al. (2014), explores the relations among three related concepts—mentalization, affect consciousness, and mindfulness—and reaches the conclusion that mentalization and mindfulness share some common variance, but contrary to expectations, affect consciousness seems to be more different from RF and mindfulness than expected. They suggest that the concept of “mentalized affectivity” might help to explain this outcome. The second article by Fossati, Feeney, Maffei, and Borroni (2014) evaluates and confirms hypotheses by Fonagy and Bateman concerning the interrelations among borderline personality disorder, mentaliza